Hakia to Revolutionize Online Shopping Experience

February 25, 2013

Canadian start-up Flow, is teaming up with Hakia to provide semantic search capabilities within a closed platform and take online shopping into a new realm in terms of product specificity and search capability.

Until now e-commerce sites have followed roughly the same pattern; Ebay and Amazon, both powerhouses in the online shopping experience introduced a platform for “every product” and have made a lot of money in the last decade.

The article from Silicon Angle, “Flow Adds Semantic Search from Hakia to Revolutionize E-Commerce,” lays out how Flow and Hakia are creating a different way to search for the products you are looking for, without having to wade through all the extraneous mumbo jumbo. This new partnership hopes to do is to create a social flow and eliminate the sixth degree of separation.

“eCommerce as we know it is pretty entrenched, but social commerce is slowly emerging to challenge the status quo. It’s a concept that’s evolved from what are probably the two biggest phenomena on the web – online shopping and social media. And it’s a natural evolution too, as it only makes sense for marketers to connect with their customers to better understand their needs and position themselves as the ones to provide it.”

Facebook is probably the biggest example of the social marketplace at the moment. Facebook isn’t a shopping powerhouse because it has no search structure. Utilizing semantic search is going to create a kind of exclusive marketplace that hopes to promote less cutthroat competition; since users will be finding exact matches for their searches there’s no competition for most hits in order to remain at the top.

But can the Flow/Hakia partnership really pull through with those kinds of promises? It seems like a pretty tall order to fill. Functionality and no middlemen sound like a dream come true to eCommerce consumers, but the proof is in the pudding.

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining
and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky.
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